Jesse Ventura won a settlement for $1.8 million dollars against Chris Kyle, the Navy SEAL sniper who wrote American Sniper. In the book, Kyle claims he overheard Ventura talking anti American shit at a Navy SEALS reunion, including about how the Navy SEALS could lose a few pounds and how the U.S. was killing innocent Iraqi civilians. Naturally, he punched Ventura. Ventura claims he never badmouthed America or the SEALS, he never got punched, and that his reputation had been damaged by the book to the point it was becoming difficult to book speaking engagements about why his hair suddenly went missing after being interviewed by the FBI. Ventura sued Kyle over the book but Kyle ended up getting shot and killed by a crazed Marine on a gun range in Texas in 2013. But the book had already raked in over $6 million in sales to the Kyle family, so the trial continued.

The jury heard from a bunch of reunion eyewitnesses who claim the altercation never occurred that evening and awarded Ventura the cash from the Kyle estate. I’m not sure why Kyle felt the need to lie about Ventura in his book. Maybe he really did get into a drunken fight at the reunion with some douchebag and woke up the next morning assuming that douchebag was Jesse Ventura. Easy mistake. I bet that happens to a lot of people who come across Jesse Ventura.

(3) Comments

Jesse Ventura is giant bag of assholes. AND that doesn’t even take into account the fact that he sued the widow of a fucking American war hero.

The Mildly Tanned Knight 07/30/2014 18:14

Matt, I try never to take things said too serious (especially considered the low-level of douchebags they’ve hired since the site stopped being cool), but there is ZERO evidence Kyle lied, and a dozen Seals and wives or moms of Seals who saw the altercation and testified in court backing Kyle. Yeah, the 8 out of 10 people on the jury (three of whom thought Ventura was a lying piece of shit 20 minutes before they changed their minds for the final verdict) went with the live celebrity testifying in front of them instead of the dead guy they’d never heard of, but that’s not what you said.

Since Ventura has a history of saying batshit crazy things (including attacking the troops), it’s kind of likely that what Kyle said was 100% true.

Beylerbey 07/31/2014 15:05

The execrable Venture notwithstanding, there’s a bigger point here: not only is this ubiquitous soldier-worship way, way out of hand in 2014, it’s also profoundly un-American. Conservatives fetishized military service during the Cold War, but the Founders they claim to defer to were against even having a standing army.

Chris Kyle may have been telling the truth, but he’s not a war hero. He got 200+ kills in a pointless conflict, which means his service, like my own, was for nothing. I’ll take Ventura over some neocon who honestly thinks a branch of the federal government keeps us free.